Cecil Alan Pennock COHASSET MY PLACE

COHASSET PLACE

I owned seven beautiful acres in Cohasset. I had a spring that ran all year long. I lived here for ten years. For several years, I had forgotten about remote control. I was busy cutting firewood and clearing land. You may think life would be hard, but if it was, I did not see it. Everything was fun, even the deep snow. I walked to work at midnight, and enjoyed the peace. I did not mind shoveling snow off the mobile home. My wife, and a golden retriever, and two pet goats, would take long walks to the stream. The forest was alive and so wonderful.
RULERMAR

1980
My stream and dam.
My boy, Joseph

"Posterity is just around the corner."
-George Kaufman

I had a stupid notion of "owning". It was a material world for me then. Everything was "owned" and "possessed". But everything is given on loan. We all have many years to merely pass through a beautiful garden. We can touch and smell, but we can never keep.

1974.JAN.
View from my front glass door of the mobile home.

Do you see how important remote control is? Things get rugged!

My boss Russ bought me a snowmobile, and I had a snow cat parked down at the store. But you can only do so much. Good remote control would solve so many problems.

1980.APR.
At my ex-wife's mom's ranch in the valley...
Love to shoot...

I had a 100 yd shooting range in Cohasset.
It was not much: just a clearing. I bulldozed a berm of dirt at one end. Didn't I know that a stray bullet can travel 1/2 mile? This is in the range of neighbors. As a second safety I had a lot of big trees, but it is a stupid notion to rely on trees stopping a bullet. It scares me now, to realize how much ammo I shot down there.

I reloaded almost all of my own ammo. I had all the equipment. I breathed lead, tin, and antimony. And spent hours perfecting just the right load.

1978.JUN
Flying over the 7 acres...
To the left is Mud Creek Rd or originally called Gates Rd.
To the right is a dark hollow of Mud Creek. The property line went to mid stream. I owned one bank. I bulldozed a dirt road into the property, and PGE extended their line by a couple of power poles.

My place was .5 miles from the site that I wanted to control.

1978.JUN
Flying over the site to be controlled...
Looking toward my place (to the east)

My place was .5 miles from this site

Discover

I installed a large mirror in the chicken shed. Not once did I ever see a chicken take notice of the image. The chickens seemed to focus on the surface of the mirror, and never on their image which was at twice that distance. I am sure these feathered heads had a conciousness, but it seemed as small as a machine's. Cleaning the mirror meticulously would not solve this.

"...instead of studying a thousand rats for one hour each,
or a hundred rats for ten hous each,
the investigator is likely to study one rat for a thousand hours."

-B.F.Skinner

I could invent a control system that could equal these stupid cluckers.

I would go down to the chicken shed at dusk to watch the chickens climb unto their roost. I was fascinated by their constant rituals:

A chicken will only sleep next to a certain friend. I had specially constructed a walk ramp up to a single horizontal roost. The chickens would have to climb the ramp in a certain order to be placed in the right line up. This never happened perfectly. There was always fighting from disgust with certain unwanted sleeping partners. Resulting in rude "dismounts" from the pearch. For a half hour, selected chickens would come falling down with flapping wings and cries of supprise. Perhaps one from the middle of the line, or one over there, or one on the end. The whole process resembled falling leaves. As darkness closes in, arrangements were solidified in mystery. (If you are a human, on the modern dating scene, you will wait till morning to see your sleeping partner.)

Of course my control system would not be so petty as these cluckers: It would be important, and control machinery at a broadcast plant. RULERMAR

"We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins.
At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint.
And lo! It is our own."
-Sir Arthur Eddington

My poochy is only slightly better than the cluckers. Poochy trusts only her nose, and somehow knows that the image is a "reflection".
Every sensation is reinforced by others, just as in my control system. A consensus of sensors confidently modifies behavior. Sensor augmentation is a step up from sensor redundancy.

This is my special friend, Lexy, who I call "Poochy". For poochy, the reflection is to be ignored, and sadly, not questioned.

I am sure when an animal is at a stream or lake, and sees their reflection, that a brain switch is turned on to "disregard". In fact, the strength of this switch would have to be overwhelming: their survival would absolutely depend upon it.

In remote control theory, an example of mirrored data might be reprocessed data that has a time delay. Another example would be TEST data that is introduced into a active net. Mirrored data could produce oscillations and other undesirable effects due to the time delay and redundancy.